Golden Age of Comedy : Life provides plenty of laughs for 77-year-old Sydnie Weiss, and she passes them on to her elderly audiences.

Nestled inside a system of barbed-wire-topped walls and security stations, bunnies frolic on perfectly manicured lawns. It’s as serene as a golf course after closing time here as the lights go out in neat little bungalow apartments. Meanwhile, Sydnie Weiss drives through the Leisure World twilight in a car with a license plate frame reading, “Screw the Golden Years.”

Weiss, who turned 77 Tuesday, bills herself as the “Grandma of the Comediennes.” In the 11 years since she started, she’s played Las Vegas and a variety of local comedy haunts. Lately, though, cataracts keep her from driving at night and she usually just flexes her funny bone in a column called Weiss Cracks in the community’s Golden Rain News.

This last Wednesday night, though, she performed her comedy shtick for several hundred senior citizens gathered in the echoey A-frame chalet that is Leisure World’s Burning Tree Clubhouse. Her performance was slated for the middle of a sing-along, which, among other tunes, featured a geriatric rendition of Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” that Medi-Alert could use for a theme song.

As anyone could well be when subjected to the scrutiny and might of the Los Angeles Times, Weiss was pretty nervous before going onstage.

“Oh, I’m not worried about you,” she corrected, pointing instead to the audience, a sea of gray in folding chairs. “I’m worried about them. I have to live with them.”

Most of her material is geared for the Vegas crowd she said, “where you can say anything.” Wondering how risque she could get, she asked the sing-along’s host, who advised, “Well, you’ll notice I never use the word hell .”

Weiss didn’t use hell either, though she did raise a bit of it. Her act--with classic timing and delivery even the hall’s muddy sound couldn’t defeat--was getting laughs on such age-sensitive subjects as memory loss, digestive failure and sexual dysfunction:

“To me the worst thing is loss of memory, and we’re all going through that now. You know it. I saw two men walking along the other day. One sees the other and looks confused, and runs up to him and asks, ‘Tell me, who died, you or your brother?’ . . .

“My husband, now he’s 81 years old, and he still wants sex almost every day: almost Monday, almost Tuesday, almost Wednesday. . . .”

Weiss ended her 10-minute act with a poem addressing old age that brought a sustained peal of laughter from the audience as she was leaving the stage.

“I feel like I’m walking on air,” Weiss said, breathless. “A lot of people get very nervous because they’re scared of going on stage. I get nervous because I can’t get up there fast enough. I can’t wait to get on! I love it so.”

Back in her small apartment, which is brightened with clown bric-a-brac, she showed off the pages of a calendar on which nearly every day was filled with activities. “I’m always on the go. Everybody here knows who I am,” she said.

She keeps a scrapbook of her career, with press clippings and photos of her with the likes of Soupy Sales and Sid Caesar. She also keeps videos of her performances, and her taped Vegas routine is indeed a mite more risque than she attempted on the Leisure World stage.

She lamented: “Not all the comics are funny anymore. They’re just not the old Red Buttons, the adorable Jack Benny. There’s filth like you never heard. The dirtiest word I use is penis, and I had to steel myself for months to be able to say it in Las Vegas. I don’t even use that word in other cities.”

Weiss was born in New York’s Lower East Side, where her parents owned a dry goods store. Her father had once performed in vaudeville, and Weiss was a born ham, always singing or telling jokes. Her brother was also a joker.

“I loved to watch him shave. Once, when he was 19 and I was 9, he put shaving cream on my face, and said: ‘I shouldn’t have done that. Now you’re going to grow a beard.’ I believed him and started to cry. He said, ‘You know where the black shoe polish is? Go put it on your face and then you won’t get a beard.’ I put so much on there it took me two weeks to get all that polish off my face.”

Weiss, still beardless, kept telling jokes throughout her life, at parties and among friends. She once got an unintended laugh by popping a false front tooth right into a party guest’s drink. On a higher plane, she met comedy master Caesar through mutual friends in the ‘40s and she says she would match him, joke-for-joke, at parties.

Finally, 11 years ago, a friend prodded her to try her humor out at a local talent show. She took second prize and was hooked. Two weeks later she began hitting the Vegas lounges. She has since done talent shows, showcases and paying bookings at the Sahara, the Dunes, the Tropicana, the Mint and other casinos.

Weiss writes some of her own material, but like her favorite comedians Myron Cohen and Milton Berle, she borrows a lot of it. “But I think I tell a joke better than Milton Berle does now,” she opined.

Weiss is planning to have cataract surgery next year, and then may begin doing her comedy outside of Leisure World again. “I agree with (Norman) Cousins that humor is the best medicine,” she says, noting that she’d never been ill until a prescription medicine laid her low last year. She also believes her humor and spirit helped keep her husband, Bernie, alive for his last years. She’s seen what negativity, inactivity and loneliness can do some of her peers. She still tells jokes about her husband in the present tense, though he died eight years ago. “He was my staunchest fan and helper,” she said. “He would tell me what worked and didn’t. So I know wherever he is he’s still cheering me on.

“I’m a light sleeper, usually only getting two hours a night. But one night a while ago I fell into a deep sleep. I could have sworn he was lying next to me--I could feel the warmth of his body. He was a good egg.”